But promptly, amid this maze of “knows” and “don’t knows” and with the hot flush of mortification on her cheek, our heroine had passed into the land of dreams.
CHAPTER XV.
A TEXT FROM GOETHE.
Jessica had gone to bed a homesick, ashamed, discouraged girl. She awoke, full of determination to conquer all the difficulties of this “education” which had, last night, seemed so formidable.
As she stood before her little mirror, brushing the yellow curls into that semblance of order which was their morning state, and that so soon gave place to a tangle of glistening threads and escaping tendrils, she regarded herself with severity.
“Jessica Trent, you may be going to be ‘one of the richest’ sometime, but at present you are a simpleton. You’ve got everything before you—not a thing behind, except—Well, except knowing how to ride a horse or an ostrich, or hit a bull’s-eye, or a few other things that Madame Mearsom would surely say were ‘unbefitting a gentlewoman.’ I used to love that word, hearing my mother use it. I begin—I begin to hate it! Humph! There goes, already! A gentlewoman doesn’t say ‘hate.’ But listen, you girl in the glass. I’m going to study so hard I’ll catch up with that lowest ‘form’ I’m not clever enough to enter yet; and I’ll pass it by. Then I’ll tackle the next one, and leave that behind. I’ll—get to be the highest-up, intelligentest—that doesn’t sound right but you know what I mean, Jessica Trent. I’ll be the head of the school, as Aubrey said that handsome Helen Rhinelander is. I’ll take care to keep every rule and I’ll find out what they are. And I’ll do it all for love’s sake—for my mother! I made a bad beginning, but ‘Little Captain,’ hear me say I’m bound to make a good ending. I WILL! Right here and now I’ll write that poetry out, which Madame quoted from that Goethe. I know who he was, my father had his books in his little library. Maybe, who knows! it might have been that very verse which encouraged dear father to go ahead and start Sobrante and try to help so many people. He believed he could ‘do’ it and he did. I remember it exactly.”
Taking a sheet of the school paper which was supplied to each girl’s room, Jessica wrote in her very best hand, and in that large size which would make the script readable from every part of the room.
“What you can do, or think you can, begin it.
Boldness hath genius, power, and magic in it.”
This she pinned to the mirror-frame, and, after her brief devotions, she answered to the “assembly bell” that summoned her to the hall below; and entered as “boldly” as if her heart were not beating very fast and her cheek glowing very red, meeting the curious gaze of her schoolmates.